Boris Karloff’s Favorite Horror Stories by Boris Karloff

Author:Boris Karloff [Karloff, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1965-05-02T21:00:00+00:00

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the curl of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special signifiance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots are plotted. In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone.

I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

The man met me every day; early or late, he was around. I never asked him anything about himself. Somehow that never came up. He never read anything to me. He would point out the ‘letters’ and occasionally the ‘letter-groups’ like (analogously) ‘-ing’ and ‘-ous’ and ‘un-,’ and would correct me where I read it wrong. But when I got to where I could read whole sentences, he stopped me. He told me that the one thing I must never do is to read off what I read on a grave, aloud. Not even to him. Those who could read it, would, if they cared to. Those who could not must learn as I was learning, or not know what was written there. “There are reasons enough for not wanting to die,” he told me, “without adding the fear that someone like you will go around abusing this privilege.”

I would go home at night filled with a grey hope, that at last all the mysteries of that woman would be solved for me, and every sordid, rotten thing she had done and kept secret would be illuminated for me. I didn’t sleep very well—I hadn’t, since the day she left—and I had lots of time to think over the things she had done to me, and the things she probably had done to me, and the things she was doubtless capable of doing. Maybe this long period of insufficient sleep did something to me; I don’t know, but I didn’t mind it. I did my work at the office, enough to get along, saving my strength and my brain for the evening; and then I worked at my lessons. I worked.

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